Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio(bruno-simon.com) |
Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio(bruno-simon.com) |
B or CTL is brake
H is horn
Could you share these other in-browser demos that are as amazing as this one?
11/10 creativity.
8GB M3 MacBookAir runs it smoothly, with only a few seconds of loading.
let's see ATS parse this
the collision physics on individual items like chairs is pretty cool
damn map has no boundary ha, weather system? damn
It loads, I can navigate (drag), and click the white diamonds.
There are things like the RC truck and bowling ball that are not interactive and look like they should be, so I suspect it's a bug?
EDIT: OK it's a learning curve. With mouse/keyboard, you can click the hamburger icon in the top right, and get to an explanation of controls. I am able to use WADS to drive the truck and push the bowling ball (with the truck.)
One of the unsung problems of any technology is understanding what you can do with it that you could not do before. Lets say you are a prehistoric person and somehow you find a modern steel axe. What do you do with it? Ultimately, it is not the axe that is important, it is the metallurgy.
Lets say you are a modern person and you found bitcoin. What do you do with it? Again, my thought is not the bitcoin, it is the cryptographic technology.
Lets say you are a modern person and you find threejs. What do you do with it? My personal reaction is that there is so much more that can be done with threejs, react-three-fiber, react-three drei, shaders, shadertoys, than this.
For me the definition of "cool" is things that change how you see the world. Where you never look at things the same way. A little example for me was this:
All in all I'd say, I'm impressed, and enjoyed it. Though I think the HN title ("handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites") is maybe a bit much. It's an extremely-well-executed portfolio site; no more, no less.
How many cooler 3D websites do you know? I personally know less than 10, and only https://messenger.abeto.co/ off the top of my head.
Since then I’ve seen several other sites along similar lines, since Unity released a similar capability, but I haven’t kept track of them. The problem is they’re all essentially games that are more impressive for their look than their functionality, so they tend to have a spike of interest when people first see them and then you never hear of them again. And typically, the tech bitrots and the sites stop working after a while.
I am irked that on desktop it does not work in Firefox, but only in Chrome (and presumably other Chromium based browsers).
I'm not a big fan of Chrome, for a variety of reasons, but principally because I don't trust it and can no longer use a good ad blocker, so I never really enjoy having to fire it up.
Today, I loaded the site up and spend about 30 seconds on it before deciding "this is cool!" and moving on, probably never to return.
What changed? I guess it's a mix of: (A) How I value my time. (B) The bar for "what pulls me in" in terms of gaming. (C) Some other factor around me just having already burned enough hours on games.
I'm not really sure how much each factor contributes.
His website had the same car based premise back then but with less frills.
That said, it's not 'hands down, one of the coolest 3D websites', at least that I've seen. It's all "technical", very little "design". For example, why is it 'isometric overhead'? There's no particular benefit in the view, and it's specifically harder to control than it would be with a 'chase'/'third-person' camera. It's not like this is an RTS or a city-builder-ish thing, where having an overhead layout works to your benefit. Rather, it's just easier to program a camera that never changes angles and input controls that never have to re-interpret camera position/rotation (lookat vector) to function correctly. And there's a kind of symmetry between a flat page and the "ground" that the truck drives on, so some parts of the web forms have been ported over to that.
Again, none of that is bad and especially none of it is wrong. It's very cool that it works and works so well (technical)! It's just that the design feels more "portfolio" than it does "best ux for interacting with the environment I've created and the paradigms I've invoked (vehicle control)".
Some behind the scenes from the Bruno himself:
https://medium.com/@bruno_simon/bruno-simon-portfolio-case-s...
I love all the work that Bruno puts out there. His design and engineering skills are next level.
There are so many talented creatives using WebGL/WebGPU that I've recently launched WebGL.com / WebGPU.com, where I'm dedicated to bring together the community of creatives (designers, coders, AI/ML, etc.) pushing the boundaries of the web.
Would love to see what you would like to see (e.g. tutorials, demos, etc.)
Alas, the state of WebComponents for 3d / spatial is so so. A-frame is still CJS only & won't work with my unbundled setup because of that, but that's sort of on me. Lume.io wraps three.js too and looks tempting, has a neat signals & cool behavioral classes. https://aframe.io/examples/ https://github.com/aframevr/aframe/issues/4242 https://lume.io/
Bruno Simon – 3D Curriculum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362200 - Oct 2019 (42 comments)
But my point is that, it's not bringing in a new paradigm of UX that you'd want to immitate.
Though maybe it could if others started making "video games but it's just navigating through a website as you play".
And by now my kids play fluidly immersive 3D games, on the web, on the kind of computers you can get for $10 off Facebook Marketplace.
There’s a surprising amount of stutter and lag on iOS, evident after the loading bar completes and the app freezes for 30 sec. Also during gameplay, quite a bit of stuttering. My guess is GPU texture uploads or shader compilations. Otherwise it was buttery smooth.
Anyway, super fun.
Really cool website, no doubt about it. But it consumes as many or more resources than games like cyberpunk or baldur's gate 3 on my macbook.
Now who was there with me running it up at the same time :)
That said, there's some games out there today that draw me in just as much as others did 25 years ago; I've spent hundreds of hours in Factorio, I can't imagine how much I'd be into it 25 years ago (...assuming I would have understood it back then). Likewise, I'm sure I'd be a lot more into Minecraft if I was 25 years younger.
If this is the sort of thing you like (or in your case, used to like), you will like The Messenger too, probably more.
Personally, I feel too guilty about everything else I'm not doing. (This results in me feeling maximal guilt and doing minimal anything at all.)
“Productivity” is not the end goal, you are allowed to play games in life. In fact, shouldn’t work be about enabling you to enjoy life?
I was roaming around RE-PC in Seattle eons ago, and found an old CD of the game for $1. Snatched that sucker right up.
If I wanted to play a game like this I'd play Lonely Mountain: Downhill, which has waaay more content.
I think playing (some) video games can be a bit better for your brain vs. the above alternatives. At least many of them require thought and/or coordination.
Again, there are exceptions, where they’re not much better than doom scrolling. But it’s not hard to find some that require some effort and thought.
I think there's definitely a raising-the-bar effect here too.
That's design exactly. There's no technical obstacle to making it over-the-shoulder instead, but it changes the aesthetic. The animations focus on what the jeep does to things, so a racing view that helps you avoid running into things wouldn't be appropriate. It also changes how you see the assets. And you'd lose that 'RC Pro-Am' feel.
> Rather, it's just easier to program a camera that never changes angles and input controls that never have to re-interpret camera position/rotation (lookat vector) to function correctly.
Not really, you just put the camera on a spring arm attached to the vehicle. Vehicle movement isn't harder either. You get this stuff practically for free with any game engine.
You're welcome to your counter-opinion about the design, but you haven't convinced me. I've played plenty of games with third-person views where the gameplay was quite conducive to running in to things. I can also appreciate that the design is faux-retro, but that's kind of my whole issue with it. Sticking to a design because it is nostalgic is not user-focused. It's demographically limiting, by design. It's specifically niche-targeting. That's the opposite of trying to make the best kind of thing for the most kinds of people. Which is a business interest of a portfolio site. Building a little game for people who likes those types of games? Sweet! More power to you. But if you're showcasing a demo for wide audiences, a critique of the niche-targeting is valid. Not nearly as important as the people claiming they can't even play the game, for sure! But if you bounce one person because they press up on the keyboard and the truck moves "forward", and they don't like that - it's a marked negative for the site's intent.
You can't worry about pleasing everyone, and you especially can't worry about broad, overall, two-paragraph critiques on literal months of dedicated work. But neither of those make the critiques, themselves, improper or even wrong.
Would love to see those websites.
Of course, with WebGL and WebGPU support becoming ever more ubiquitous I'm not sure when 'impressive 3D website' just becomes either 'impressive website' or 'impressive 3D'.
This is a very well made little game that also showcases some of their work. I was hoping for something like, now I wish all websites were like this.
After watching developer's "making of" video, I went and grabbed my USB gamepad (from twenty years ago) — whenever the gamepad is plugged in, Bruno's gamesite stops responding (until controller is unplugged).
I would recon if this isn't playing on your end, it has more to do with using uncommon hardware configurations (not necessarily lack of horsepower).
It showed up very quickly on my desktop rig. Linux, Firefox, with a CPU that's over a decade old, a GPU of about half that age, and the cheapest Internet that Spectrum will sell me.
Just a second or three of a weird luminescent throbber, and then "Click here to start". No inexplicable lags at all -- it was all very smooth.
As a portfolio to demonstrate your three.js skills for web game making it's really good.
You seemed to imply that the developer chose isometric to make development easier. I'm rebutting that this is unlikely; they're equally easy with an engine (and if you're not using an engine, you're skilled enough that they're still equally easy).
> But neither of those make the critiques, themselves, improper or even wrong.
Are you referring to my critique of your critique of razzmatak's critique ("Handsdown one of the coolest 3D websites")? Surely if you're allowed to disagree with them, I am with you.
> Are you referring to[...]
I'm referring to critique, in general, for the former, and my specific two paragraphs of critique on the project - not the commentary - for the latter. Your being "allowed" to disagree with me is what is meant by the sentence "You're welcome to your counter-opinion about the design, but you haven't convinced me."
It's a real self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. I agree that it's not healthy. It's just hard to break out of.
If you ever figure out the solution to this negative thought-loop, let me know please!